At the recent International Consumer Electronics Show (ICES) that was held this Monday, LG expressed their interest in business alliance, namely, a “Smart TV Alliance” by securing new partners. Smart TV Alliance is an industry body complete with involvements from LG Electronics, Philips, Qualcomm, and Toshiba just to name a few.

But why build alliances? Well, there are three major reasons.

First of all, the TV market is fragmented with LG Smart TVs, Google TV to Samsung seeking the attention from talented developers. It is the aim of Smart TV Alliance to fix this fragmented market opportunity for television makers and application developers.

Secondly, with the efficient management of the common software ecosystem, it will allow software developers to write applications for smart TV platforms more easily, within a shared environment. In other words, Smart TV Alliance will assist app developers to create new, platform-independent services by developing a non-proprietary ecosystem.

As Acting President of LG, Richard Choi said,

“[with Smart TV Alliance,] app developers will now be free to do what they do best of all – develop innovative new services and applications without needing to chase up the individual requirements and compliance processes of each company.”

Thirdly, it gives consumers the best quality of product, because it will make it easy for Smart TV app developers to create exciting new services that is compatible with the connected TVs of each member that is in the alliance. Developers will be able to make use of upgraded Javascript, HTML5, 3D video, CSS3 specifications, MPEG-DASH Support, a common new emulator, advanced debug tools, a new application compliance checking tool and updated digital rights management.

Samsung is currently working outside of the Smart TV Alliance. Because there will be a definite shift in the dynamics this year, with formations of new business alliances and major investments in OLEDs and other technology by LG as mentioned in my previous article, life for LG might as well just keep getting better. But what will happen to Samsung? Will LG and Samsung ‘partner up’, ever? Is it likely? We will investigate this further issue with regards to OLEDs and LCDs in Part II.

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